The origins of a style : an art-historical analysis of the architectural motifs at Fatpūr Sīkrī

Description

The most important issue dealt with in this thesis is the
question of change brought about in artistic form and meaning when
a new dynamic system encounters a rich traditional one. As new
challenges are faced, Islamic art is clearly influenced by, and
itself influences, changes within an existing indigenous order.
Its interpretive quality and distinctiveness is determined by its
own principles as well as by the nature of the indigenous system.
Fathpur Sikri, built ln the mid-sixteenth...[Show more] century as the
capital of the Mughal Empire, is a particularly interesting case
study of this artistic change. It was built by the Emperor Akbar,
whose vision of an integrated political and cultural empire had a
lasting impact at a political, social and cultural level. The
artistic idiom consciously developed at his court was to become a
major element in Mughal and post-Mughal Indian art. As a patron of
art and letters, Akbar was unique, and yet he continued a tradition
of courtly patronage which had become a characteristic of Islamic
art. His court was modelled on those of his Timurid ancestors
which had been some of the major centres of the post-eleventh century
Khurasanian renaissance of Islamic Iran.
The most dynamic challenge in Islamic art occurred during the
ninth to fifteenth centuries in Iran. It was during this formative
stage that major questions regarding cultural influences, assimilation,
borrowing and evolutionary sequences were handled in such a way that
art became a creative and enriching influence as it spread. Islamic
art, which can be considered neither as a religious art in the same
sense as Buddhist or Medieval Christian art can be, nor a geographical
art, as Chinese or Japanese art is, aquired its own meaning during
this phase. A convenient analogy is Gothic or Baroque art; this
suggests a prominent artistic and cultural moment in a long history of an indigenous tradition. Such a moment occurred within the
Indian artistic tradition by the middle of the sixteenth century.
Muslim rule had been established here for over three hundred years
and the interaction between the new and the old had brought about
certain changes in both. Fathpur Sikri signifies an historical
time in Indian cultural history when syncretistic forces had become
effective and when cultural integration had stabilized enough for
art to be successful, productive and highly creative. A new
artistic expression is born which is neither colonial nor imitative.
Mughal art, using a Perso-Islamic idiom, acquired a whole new
repertoire of symbolic motifs. At the same time, a new perspective,
elegance in line, emphasis on beauty, symmetry and rhythm was
introduced into Indian art. At a superficial level, these developments
may be seen as empty ornamentation, but the prominent and
consistent emphasis on these effects requires a deeper examination
of the meaning in this new art. Without any meaning it would
neither have continued in a sophisticated idiom, nor reached a
classical stage of expression.
Mughal art is neither didactic nociconographically symbolic in
the same sense as traditional Indian art is. The Islamic injunction
against figural representation was probably a reason for this move
away from iconographically meaningful art. As in Islamic art in
general, here also, we note an ideological shift in artistic expression
from the strictly-ordered metaphysical to the elegant and mundane
sphere of time and physical senses. However, a spiritual message
remains, although it is now expressed through the subjective intellect
and senses. Such a message can be seen in the underlying attitude
in this art. The treatment of existing forms rather than the invention of new ones becomes important. Abstraction, arbitrariness,
stylization, mixture of thematic elements, illusion-creating effects,
play on light and shade are used not just for visual pleasure but
also to convey certain ideas. If one were to seek a parallel in a
general cultural attitude, then the idea that no creation of man can
reproduce that of God ' s is perhaps the underlying assumption in this
artistic idiom. Man ' s creations can only express, in an artificial
way, the beauty of such a creation. The other meaning in form may
be found in Islamic geometric art where the emphasis is on an underlying
order to all phenomenal diversity.
It is this idiom which gives uniformity to Islamic art from
Cordoba to Agra. A new way of contemplating motifs, and expressing
them as a unified whole, becomes the ~rime concern of this artistic
expression. Therefore, not any subject was randomly chosen or
immediately ornamentalized. Art, on the contrary, becomes a way of
treating a variety of motifs and themes, without necessarily
destroying their independent meaning. Thus iconographically
meaningful themes are used along highly stylized ornamental ones.
At Fathpur Sikri this system is employed so often and so harmoniously
that the interpretation in art appears to be entirely subject to the
mood and capabilities of the beholder. Such an interpretive value
was a remarkable development for its time.
The formal method employed in this type of ornamentation is
based on the atomization of motifs, an analysis of their constituent
elements, and a logical recomposition of these on the principles of
ornamental geometry. This method is basically an Iranian heritage.
It was a pre-Islamic method used in Sasanian art, but had been taken
to new heights under Islamic patronage. Such a method suited an
art which not only borrowed from a large number of sources, but also
placed an emphasis on stylized effects.
Although change and evolution were characteristic of Islamic
art in general, the qualitative aspect of this change finally
depended on the nature of the specific Islamic patronage and on the
indigenous milieu it interacted with. Th us Islamic art is a series
of different interpretations of a similar perspective. India,
with an ancient and sophisticated tradition of symbolic art,
naturally posed a dynamic challenge. It is here, therefore, that
we find one of the finest expressions of change in artistic form
and meaning in medieval Asia.